


The Family Business

by Jaydee_Faire



Category: Artemis Fowl - Eoin Colfer
Genre: Drug Use, Gen, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Lemurs are not a renewable resource, Unsubtle Breaking Bad References, actual Breaking Bad references
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-10
Updated: 2016-06-10
Packaged: 2018-07-14 05:16:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7155233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jaydee_Faire/pseuds/Jaydee_Faire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Myles discovers the lengths his older brother will go to to keep the Fowl family's finances in the black.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Family Business

“You’re terrible at this,” Beckett said cheerfully as Myles stumbled over the football again while trying to kick it. “Really.”

“Stuff it,” Myles grumbled, trying again. It couldn’t be that hard, it really couldn’t, if Beckett could manage it. This time the toe of his shoe did connect with the ball, sending it skidding across the yard, several feet left of the goal.

“S'amazing, really, how terrible you are,” Beckett grinned, hooking the ball easily onto his foot and balancing it there. “Worse than Arty, and that’s saying something.”

Myles brushed grass off of his trousers. “You’re the one who said I should come and play with you.”

“Better than staying inside on a day like this,” Beckett said. “But s'not really playing, what you’re doing, is it?”

“I’m going back to my lab,” Myles said flatly, turning away.

“Gonna rot in there!” Beckett called after him, now balancing the ball on his head. “Stay out here and get a little sun, so you don’t look so pale!”

“We’re _Irish!”_ Myles snarled over his shoulder, then stalked into the house, slamming the door behind him.

_Pale,_ honestly. And it was lovely that Beckett was good at sports, it really was, but he didn’t have to go rubbing everyone else’s noses in it at every opportunity. Granted, Beck didn’t have many playmates that were willing– and able– to kick a football around with him besides Juliet. Myles spent much of his day either studying in the library or working on projects in his personal lab, a smaller version of the much larger and more advanced house lab that was unquestionably Artemis’ domain.

The lab, that was it, and as Myles climbed the stairs to his room and changed out of the Brioni suit that he’d put on to play with his brother, he knew that a little time working with his phosphorescent mice would quickly soothe his irritation at his brother’s teasing.

But his centrifuge, an older model that Butler had lugged up out of storage, was no longer spinning at the rate it should. Artemis had said that it probably needed to be recalibrated, and promised that they’d crack open the machine and fix it together, one of these afternoons. Well, it was afternoon now, wasn’t it? And if Arty wasn’t up to fixing the old machine, the least he could do was let Myles use the new, big one in the house lab. Myles had been itching to try it out for ages.

He wasn’t _technically_ allowed inside the house lab. There was a strict eighteen-and-older policy, which basically meant No Twins Allowed. Myles found this awfully unfair, seeing as Beckett was the one that contaminated all of Artemis’ slides with marmalade. _He,_ on the other hand, was trustworthy enough to have his _own_ lab, albeit smaller and filled with older, less valuable equipment. He was sure that what Artemis meant was no _Becketts_ allowed, and that Myleses were all right as long as they were careful with the glassware.

Myles gathered up his samples, shrugged on his labcoat– custom made to fit him, with ’M. FOWL’ embroidered on the breast pocket– and made his way down the hall to the reinforced double doors of the house lab. The door was locked with a digital keypad, but Myles had known the code for ages, and he didn’t want to disturb his older brother by knocking on the door. He tapped in the passcode, waited for the lock mechanism to disengage, then slipped into the lab.

Compared to his personal lab (which, he had to admit, was little more than a repurposed walk-in closet that had previously housed part of his mother’s shoe collection), the house lab was massive. Myles had been in here before, but always under his older brother’s close supervision. He looked around in awe– and envy– as he made his way towards the back of the laboratory, where he knew the centrifuge was housed on top of a cement block that went all the way down to the manor’s ancient foundation, to keep from making the floors vibrate when it was turned on.

He could hear Artemis back there, too, humming “Ode to Joy” to himself as he worked. A simple little tune, which meant that he was working on what he considered a simple little project. Myles crept forward, trying to be quiet but not stealthy. He didn’t want to startle Artemis, but also didn’t want to be caught sneaking. He didn’t _sneak._ He was allowed in the house lab. Well, he _ought_ to be allowed in the house lab, which was probably just as good.

“You know you aren’t allowed in the house lab,” Artemis said without turning around.

Myles stopped, hunching his shoulders guiltily. “But–”

“Put on some safety goggles, at least.”

Heart lifting, Myles set his rack of test tube samples down on a nearby table and went to take a pair of goggles down from a row of pegs along one wall. When he came back to Artemis’ side, he found his brother wearing not just the goggles, but a heavy pair of gloves and a plastic apron as well. A respirator hung by its strap around his neck. Myles’ gaze went from all the protective gear to the various greasy-looking concoctions bubbling away on burners on the table. Looking up, he saw that Artemis had chosen this table because it was directly underneath the lab’s fume hood, and his stomach clenched.

Myles wasn’t stupid. Far from it. He was already nine years old, only one year away from the age Artemis had been when he’d had his first criminal adventure. He knew lots of things about the world already, and Juliet had let him and Beckett watch most of the first season of _Breaking Bad_ before Butler had put a stop to it.

“Artemis,” Myles asked in a small voice, “… are you cooking meth?”

Artemis stopped in his work to look down at him. “Myles, we are _billionaires._ Do you really think I would be spending my valuable time in a laboratory ‘cooking meth’?” He snorted, turning away again. “It’s MDMA. Slightly less objectionable, and far more popular around the nightclub scene.”

“That’s a drug,” Myles said. “I think.”

“My, they do grow up fast,” Artemis said sarcastically. “Yes, Myles, it is a drug. One I’ve been making and selling off and on since I was fifteen, to help keep the Fowl’s finances out of the red. That prosthesis of father’s cost a fortune, and Mother hasn’t stopped her habit of throwing money at every sad-eyed endangered trout she comes across. With Father officially out of the family business, _someone_ had to keep the bills paid.”

Myles tucked his chin, trying to process this information. He’d known that money had to be coming from somewhere, but he’d always assumed it was from patents on Artemis’ inventions. Even so, his parents _did_ seem to spend a lot of money on trips to Switzerland and the Bahamas. “Does Father know about this?” he asked timidly.

“Of course he does. Even before he’d met Mother, he’d already made his fortune smuggling cocaine into Soviet Russia. That was _how_ he met Mother, actually,” Artemis said with a faint smile. “Towards the end of the 80’s, the whole business was starting dangerous. Contacts with the Russian mob were going sour. So she convinced him to go straight.” He wrinkled his nose. “Instead of cocaine, he thought he’d try to sell cola. But the Mafiya put an RPG in the hull of the _Fowl Star_ and sank it before he’d even reached the harbor.”

“Father tells it a little differently,” Myles said.

“I know he does.”

“Mother said he wanted to save the world,” Myles went on, plaintively.

“The world, and his own skin,” Artemis laughed. “I hadn’t any idea what he’d been up to at the time. When he disappeared, I tried to keep our heads above water with tech patents and paintings and what have you, and then resorted to black market trading. That incident with the lemur,” he said, eyes going afar for a moment. “But even that didn’t work for long, not with Mother’s treatments and then repairs to the foyer after our little Christmas mishap. It was only after we recovered Father, and I had a chance to sit down with him to ask him how in the world he’d made all of this work, that he confessed to me and things finally began to make sense. The smugglers. The South American contacts. The Russians. Everything fell into place, and I knew what I’d have to do. What I’d have to start doing.”

“Selling cocaine?”

“At first. But there are too many fingers in that pie already, Myles, too many ways for it to go wrong. That’s how Father ended up with one less foot to stand on, as it were. I had no desire to end up like he did, so I went searching for something simpler. And voila.” Artemis waved the tongs he was holding like a baton. “Ecstasy tablets are shockingly simple to make if you aren’t a total simpleton, provided you have the right ingredients and the right equipment. A dozen hours a week in the lab, which is where I would prefer to be anyway, and coupled with my rebuilt stock portfolio and the fees from the lectures I wrote for Neil Degrasse Tyson, the Fowl finances are not only solid but sitting on a more than adequate nest egg for you and Beckett to go to University on.”

“Oh,” was all Myles could say, staring down at the scorch-marked glassware. “I… I see.” He swallowed. “I know what cocaine is. And I’m glad Father doesn’t deal in it anymore. But the things that you make… they don’t… hurt anyone, do they?”

“No one at all,” Artemis said, and his smile was as wide and toothy as a shark’s. He pulled off one glove and ruffled Myles’ hair with his bare hand. “So, you know the family secret. And it’s not much of a secret, really, lots of people know already, but no one talks about it. So see that you don’t talk about it, either, hmm?”

Myles nodded, eyes down. For the family. For Mother and for Father and for Beckett. Father had often spoke of doing the right thing, even if it seemed hard or painful at the time. And both his parents had always held Artemis up as someone to be admired, someone to be emulated, someone selfless and perfect. And he’d never known anything created with science to be that bad, anyway, if you were careful with it.

So it was all right, probably. Maybe.

“What brought you wandering in here, anyway?” Artemis asked, pulling off his other glove and reaching behind him to unfasten his apron. “Beckett kick the football through one of the panels on your greenhouse again?”

“N-no I– my centrifuge is broken, remember? I came to see if…”

“Brought your samples?”

“Yes. Just there.”

“Properly capped and sealed this time, aren’t they? We don’t want a repeat of last time.”

“No, I checked them all myself…”

“All right then. I’ll help you load them in, it’s a bit of a stretch to reach over the rim.” Artemis stepped away from his table, leaving his protective gear draped over a chair. “Most of what I’ve got has to set for a while in any case.”

Myles was suspicious about Artemis’ sudden cheerful mood, but he wasn’t about to pass up a chance to spend time with his older brother without Beckett bouncing all around them. Still…

“The thing that you were talking about,” Myles said, then wilted a little in Artemis’ glare. “…That I know I’m not supposed to talk about. Is that why Father’s always suffering from hayfever?”

“My, they _do_ grow up fast,” Artemis said, shaking his head.

**Author's Note:**

> My buddy Sabra and I were discussing what drugs the Fowls would be into, and then I wrote a thing. It came out remarkably tame since usually my AF fics have all the Fowls fucking each other. Originally posted to Tumblr.


End file.
